I saw an Issues post too that said there might be an issue with it pulling BV calculations for a higher formation instead of the formation it's trying to, leading to inflated BV against your puny lance of meks.
In my campaign, I started as a training lance. After a period of training these green pilots, I had enough to give them Regular rank as mechwarriors and some leadership skills (the Veteran trainee lance leader I left retired). I used their personal savings as the starting C-Bills for the new unit, hired a random 4th person and support crew and went off to a contract.
As time went on, I bumped the Intensity setting up to 1. If you feel like a low intensity is cheesing it, you can also ceate a custom contract with a low contract payout to balance out the low intensity. I also started on Green difficulty as I think that loweres oppoent BV before I put it on Normal.
If you start in certain eras and you have the Era repair mods on, keep in mind your stuff will simply melt at the default settings when you are on contract. For era repairs, I set my repairs to only damage on a failure of 7 or more and set the Maint rolls to every 60 days. That way the stuff degrades but you won't constantly have to repair broken parts, only sometimes. In less penalized eras this could make it too easy and bypass the system though.
Once you have multiple lances, you can put them in a larger formation such as a company of three lances. If you put at least a single unit at the company level, you can deploy the whole company to your scenario through stratcon. However keep in mind that this will be what the objective success/fail for your own units will be based on, so if it's one mech and it dies it will fail your "Preserve 50% of Silly Company" scenario objective. I think a cool way to do that would be to have that be the "Company Command Lance" area since the preserve forces objective is based on that when you deploy a superior formation. Or have it be something like a Mobile Headquarters for the Company but you might want to make a special bot for it so it doesn't charge to it's death, single machine gun blazing.
I'm up to a Mech company, an infantry battallion with a mobile company, three aerospace squadrons, a vehicle and mobile artillery company, a mech training company and a training Vlance, a VTOL squadron spread out the vehicles and infantry, and a handful of logistics vehicles I tossed into a noncombat force. I have a large reserve of mothballed units for these as well; to be honest I need reserve crew more than I do reserve equipments. I do wish the rules were clearer in the program on when I should be limited to Personnel Market and when I can do bulk hires. I've only used Personnel market so far but it pains me to wait 8 months to accumulate enough VTOL pilots for a squadron of Warrior helicoptors. Then do that for Vehicles and then gunners for both etc; takes forever in game months. I'd much rather just go to Galatea and bulk hire a bunch of teenage trainees to stick in a death machine and put them through mercenary school (Cadre Duty training contract) or some such.
Remember that you can flee your units on the first turn if you know you will lose badly.
Another neat thing is that you can assign your units to a bot and have them wreck things for you. I do this most of the time to be honest. An easy way to almost always have a bot already on your team is to take contracts under House command. Then assign your units to the House Officer team, very easy. Otherwise it's Add Bot, select all your units with shift click, change owner to bot, change bot to team 1, change bot to a handsome color and off you go (if you use double blind you will have to make sure the bots on different teams have different deployment sides too)
Finally, if the scenario generator is setting large map dimensions, remember that you can change the dimensions in MM. A 25x25 map runs much much faster than a 60x60 map because of the way the bot calculates movement. The less map there is to calculate over, the faster the movement phases will be.
A good tip for a great cheap unit is around 3025 or so the Mechbuster conventional aircraft is introduced. It has an AC/20 in the nose and carries a whole bunch of air dropped bombs.... I'm going to buy a squadron of them once I'm done with this mission. I'm at B rating now, tons of techs and stuff. I need to sit and recruit for a year or so and I should be able to expand to a second mech company since my training company is sitting on enough XP for regular skill. The mechbusters don't seem to show up in the Unit Market (yet?). In fact I don't recall ever seeing conventional fighters in it, maybe that's a bug? I see VTOL sometimes but never any conventional fighters or bluewater naval units. It would be neat if each unit type had it's own tab instead of the 3 mech vehicle(+VTOL) and aerospace there is now.
I also shot down a few dropships and was able to salvage an Overlord and I think a Union and maybe one other. The Overlord is nice, carries about a whole company of mechs. I had 100% battle loss compensation so I haven't hesitated to throw my pilots at tough scenarios this time. The contract was extremely fortuitous, it was generated immediately after my previous one concluded and it was for Galatea... that place I go after most contracts anyways as it's a mercenary Hiring Hall. Now I have a few repairable dropships in mothballs until I can do a personnel search outside of contract again.
I'm going to restructure the ToE and increase it and then find some contracts before Outreach opens up in 2030.
Another good tip is to set the AtB enemy ratios to 1 mek, 2 mixed, and 10 vehicles. This will get you lots of vehicles which makes more sense from a lore standpoint imo but also is a little easier for a mech based unit because of the weaknesses of vehicles in return for their cheap c-bill cost in general.
Another would be don't hesitate to generate a new force for your allies if the scenario generated is just really lopsided. You can generate up to a whole regiment at a time with the last tab. Right click on the top formation, add to game, choose the force in the dropdown to add it to, and hit OK.
You can even add units like this during an ongoing game at any turn. It's under the Game menu somewhere IIRC, add units from RAT. I use it to add a few VTOL to a bot or to the player team if the bots can't locate each other due to low visibility. As soon as the VTOL sees one they beeline toward each other. It sometimes can find the last surviving unit before a BV victory is reached (I use a 90% BV destroyed victory setting for the bots). Finally adding a unit to my player force allows me to use commands again, so I can do two /victory or /defeat and end the scenario if the bots can't find the last unit or something.
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Topic: MekHQ - "Just how does it work?" edition (Read 76874 times)